We all know there are books we should read to keep up with the latest ideas and theories in marketing, consumer behaviour and wider business issues. No one wants to be the only person in the meeting who hasnt heard of the latest hot trend.
But who has time to keep track of them all. Fortunately for you, MediaCom does. As the UKs favourite media agency, we need to keep on top of any new ideas that are concerned with the increasingly complex task of communicating with consumers.
Here are the latest three books that we think are worthy of your consideration. Click on the covers to read our summaries. Then add your own views in our Forum.
Once again, MediaComs Smarter Ways of Working Book Club brings you summaries of the latest business books. Our main choice this quarter, Simply Better, debunks one of marketings most revered concepts the USP. The authors argue that being different is less important than simply delivering category benefits slightly better than the competition. Did you Spot the Gorilla, offers four basic principles that can help anybody achieve out of the box thinking. Meanwhile, Freakonomics demonstrates that more conventional thinking and accepted wisdom is often completely wrong.
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This is a marketing book that aims to debunk one of the current rules of marketing engagement
The authors argue that having a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) to differentiate your brand from the competition is largely irrelevant to the consumer, impossible to maintain in any meaningful way and without any point as far as business success is concerned.
The book puts together a really interesting argument, that there are much more important things to focus on. The thrust of the argument is that, given that in most categories customer satisfaction is so low, that if you can deliver category benefits slightly better than the competition, then you can expect disproportionate levels of success. In most categories the argument that the 'customer is king' is all too often empty words. If you can get the category basics right, keep your eye on the ball and listen - really listen - to your customers, then there is massive opportunity to differentiate (by being a bit better) without doing anything massively different!
Although this argument may seem slightly surprising at first, a number of detailed examples give it credence. In an environment where so much effort is expended chasing marginal but creative innovation in order to get noticed, the solid delivery of brands against the real needs of their consumers may seem unglamourous, but the authors deliver a convincing explanation of the business success of Tesco, Orange and Ryanair for example, on this basis.
It is in the area of communications planning and execution that the brand can stand out and seek to differentiate in style and delivery - if you can deliver an integrated campaign that truly defines your brand then this is differentiation that does mean something to the consumer.
There is one interesting implication for customer insight and how it is conducted. There seems to be no difference between the amount of research and customer insight a successful business conducts versus an unsuccessful business. The difference is in the quality of the research - lots of advocacy here for senior management personally finding out about their customers - and how it is used.
Each chapter has a clear and simple point to make and an idea check section. It is not a long read - I grasped the point of it in the reading time available on one longish business trip - but it gives some clear food for thought and a salutary antidote to the almost clichd and sometimes frantic search for innovation.
The book ends with a one minute summary of the argument and 6 rules to follow. The encouragement to think 'inside the box' rather than outside does not mean throwing out any progress, or change, but a directive to redirect your creativity towards delivering what the customer truly wants. As we all only have to think of our own experiences as consumers to come up with dozens of ways things can be improved the truth of Simply Better is hard to argue with.
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I am growing extremely fond of Richard Wiseman. First he taught us in The Luck Factor that luck,
rather than being inherently random, was in fact a behaviour trait that we could learn through 4 simple
principles applied to our lives. Now, in what is effectively a broader exploration of his first book, he
teaches us how to spot those beautifully simple solutions that through history have had people wondering
Why Didnt I think of that? Follow the principles and we can expect both professional and personal
success through Spotting The Gorilla (The Gorilla being a great idea rather than a hairy primate).
It is all about psychological blind spots, you see. About avoiding the brains inherent tendency to be robotic and mindless which very often prevents us from the obvious and best answer (be it in our professional or personal lives). The human brain is primed to see what is wants to and is used to seeing. This book is about learning to be less mindless and more mindful.
So what is the key to recognising hidden opportunities in life? Well, like the key to being lucky, there are 4:
This may seem relatively abstract but a key element to Wisemans style is interactivity. The book is riddled with exercises that demonstrate his point to and on you. It makes for some compelling a ha moments (and also some funny looks if read on the train home). He also uses great historical examples of people who have overcome mindlessness to make some of the great discoveries through history (Louis Pasteur, Newton, Darwin to name but a few). And on top of all this, the book is under 100 pages and easily read in a lunch hour.
There are two criticisms of the book. Firstly this is not new ground. Anyone familiar with What If techniques will have a deja vu feeling reading this and it does take a simplified approach (but perhaps that is the point). Secondly, Wiseman uses an ongoing fictional case study at the end of each chapter that is at best totally unnecessary and at worst condescending.
So Why is a great idea a Gorilla in Wiseman parlance? Well, the books title comes from a 30 second film made by a Harvard psychologist to study the psychology of vision. The film features six basketball players, three in white shirts and three in black. The white team have a basketball and during the film pass it to one another. Halfway through the film, a man dressed as a gorilla slowly walks on, slaloms through the players, beats his chest to camera and walks off. Volunteers are asked to watch the film and count the number of passes of the ball amongst the white team. At the end of the film everyone is asked whether they saw anything unusual and very few people have spotted the gorilla. A very silly but rather cunning demonstration of a psychological blind spot.
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If Indiana Jones were an economist, hed be Steven Levitt, claim the Wall Street Journal on the
front cover of Freakonomics. This bizarre testimonial caused some amusement amongst people who
asked what I was reading over the weekend, and is perhaps less help in gleaning an insight into the
contents of the book than the other front-cover recommendation from Malcolm Gladwell: Prepare to be dazzled.
Anyone who has read Gladwells The Tipping Point will recognise a similar enquiring mind at work (and play?) here, as well as that books propensity to range around and draw links between a number of seemingly unrelated topics from all walks of life. The book touches on such themes as the decline of the Ku Klux Klan, match-rigging in Sumo wrestling, and whether its really worth an estate agent trying to sell your house for the most amount of money they can (its not, despite what you might think).
The central idea of the book is that if morality represents how people would like the world to work, then economics shows how it actually does work. The economist Levitt and his journalist co-author use the measurement tools of economics to unpick some of the mysteries of everyday life: what factors make a child successful at school? Why do drug dealers still live with their parents? Does more police actually lower crime rates?
By letting data speak for itself, rather than making moral judgements, Levitt and Dubner are able to sweep into potentially controversial territory, dismissing conventional wisdom often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through - using numbers to examine such thorny issues as: why did the crime rate drop dramatically in the US in the 1990s, against most predictions. Whilst the aforementioned conventional wisdom (or self-serving commentators) cited tougher gun control laws, a strong economy or innovative policing strategies as the reason behind the drop in crime, the authors use data to demonstrate the real reason. In the early 70s, the Supreme Court legalised abortion across the country, which meant that far fewer poor kids were born into poverty and broken families, which meant that there were far fewer disadvantaged kids growing into disadvantaged teenagers, which meant that there were substantially less people on the streets with a reason to commit crimes. You can imagine how this theory went down with the pro-life contingent.
If this book has a lesson for our industry, its that things arent always explained away as simply as they seem: just because something is an accepted wisdom doesnt necessarily mean its true. We would do well to adhere to this principle (and the rigour with which the authors demonstrate it) in trying to understand why a product is succeeding or failing, or which elements of our marketing campaigns are working against which audiences.
The book has a couple of downsides - some of the insights arent quite as astounding as the authors bluster would signify, the examination of how trends in naming of children change over time in the final chapter is a slog, and Levitts ego hoves into view with some frequency. However, the range of the subject matter and the steely glee with which Levitt and Dubner methodically dispel the facts should encourage us all to dig a little deeper into the hidden side of everything.
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